Thinkpads Forum

Trying to install XP on a IBM Thinpad 600 using a USB CD-RW device. Using WIN98 disk to boot but USB is not being recognized as a boot device. BIOS does not show USB as a option to boot. I have a internal floppy but not a cdrom. Is it a possibility to boot from USB on a 6000 series or am I at a standstill.. Thanks in advance for any advice provided...

Sorry, the 600 series cannot boot off USB. You could find a CD rom drive that will use the PCMCIA card and you should be able to boot off of that.

You can also create a floppy boot disk, and load the drivers for the USB CDRW drive onto the floppy...then you can boot the system off of the floppy and point to the installation files on the CDRW drive.

Yeah. Make a boot floppy that loads your USB CD driver, and run D:\setup or whatever to install.

Or, format the hard drive in DOS, and copy the XP installation files to it. Run the install from there. It will go much faster.

Could you explain that in a little more detail, please..

Well, you'll need a boot floppy with DOS or something compatible on it. Windows 98 or later will make a bootable diskette for you when you format one.

Add the DOS device driver for your device, if you can find one, to the floppy. This requires arcane and ancient knowledge of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT incantations... or a read through the vendor's documentation, if that's available.

Add edit and fdisk too... and EMM386 if you're feeling lucky.

Boot that diskette. Use fdisk to partition the hard drive. Format using "/s" to copy system files to the hard drive. Reboot the floppy.

Copy the Windows installation files to somewhere like C:\windows\options\cab or somewhere of your choice. Reboot the hard drive, edit your AUTOEXEC.BAT to use EMM386, and run the Windows setup program.

EMM386 isn't necessary, but it will make the install go faster.

This issue has been resolved thanks to your help. Thanks to all who contributed.